AWARE
How am I becoming more credibly informed and personally aware?
Critical Media Literacy
The explosion in information has presented a major challenge to the world of formal education. For centuries, schooling has been designed to make sure students learned facts about the world—which they proved they knew by correctly answering questions on tests. But such a system is no longer relevant when the most up-to-date facts are available at the touch of a button.
What students need today is to learn how to find what they need to know when they need to know it, from the best sources available— and to have the higher order thinking skills to analyze and evaluate whether the information they find is useful for what they want to know and do.
Center for Media Literacy
Inspire Citizens Futures Media
Media Literacy in Early Childhood Report
Observation and Intercultural Understanding
AEIOU provides a template for observing contextual inquiries and collecting qualitative data. This heuristic framework provides an observation technique used to document contextual inquiries during ethnographic studies.
The Cultural Iceberg helps us to understand when one first enters a new culture, only the most overt behaviors are apparent. As one spends more time in that new culture, the underlying beliefs, values, and thought patterns that dictate that behavior will be uncovered. What this model teaches us is that we cannot judge a new culture based only on what we see when we first enter it. We must take the time to get to know individuals from that culture and interact with them. Only by doing so can we uncover the values and beliefs that underlie the behavior of that society.
Active Listening and Interviewing
Active listening is foundational skill in developing empathy for others, identifying successes and challenges in a community, and developing deeper, trusting, reciprocal relationships with diverse community members.
Utilizing questioning strategies, such as Thinking Like a Historian, to construct follow-up questions that elicit open and transparent answers, leads to compassionate conversations, meaningful storytelling, and intercultural understanding.
Explore the overlooked benefits of pushing past our default discomfort when it comes to strangers and embracing those fleeting but profoundly beautiful moments of genuine connection. Through interviews and conversations, we can make more space for change.
Visible Thinking
Project Zero’s broader work on Visible Thinking can be defined as a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, the Visible Thinking research has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning.
Data Literacy and Graphicacy
Data is everywhere. Collected, stored, open for the taking. Yet most of our society, workforce, and students aren’t equipped with the best analytical toolkit to take in and process all this information.
For example, Charts, infographics, and diagrams are ubiquitous. They are useful because they can reveal patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. Good charts make us smarter—if we know how to read them.
However, they can also deceive us. Charts lie in a variety of ways—displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty— or are frequently misunderstood. Many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day.
Deep Reading
Resources like Notice and Note introduce strategies and “signposts” that alert readers to significant moments in a work of literature and encourages them to read closely. This helps create attentive readers who look closely at a text, interpret it responsibly and rigorously, and reflect on what it means to them. Literature, when richly comprehended enhances thinking, learning, and expanding a reader’s knowledge and horizons.